Segal, George, 1924–2000, American sculptor, b. New York City, grad. Rutgers (B.A., 1950; M.A., 1963). An influential member of the pop art pop art, a movement that first emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction against the seriousness of abstract expressionism . British and American pop artists employed a common imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express
..... Click the link for more information. movement, Segal is known for his tableaux of life-sized cast figures, usually in stark white plaster, of ordinary people placed in everyday situations and environments. His sculptures are simultaneously familiar in their form and subject and haunting in their ghostly stillness. Two major examples are Woman in Restaurant Booth (1961) and Bus Driver (Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). Segal is also noted for his public commissions, often cast in bronze and finished in white, such as Gay Liberation (1983) in New York's Greenwich Village.

Bibliography

See P. Tuchman, George Segal (1983).

Segal, George

(born Nov. 26, 1924, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died June 9, 2000, South Brunswick, N.J.) U.S. sculptor. Segal began his artistic career as an abstract painter. In 1958 he started creating sculptures from chicken wire and plaster and two years later turned to plaster casts, often using family members and friends as models. Though he was associated with members of the burgeoning Pop art movement in the late 1950s, Segal's sculptures, which were frequently outfitted with the bland commercial props of the Pop idiom, are distinguished from that characteristically ironic movement by a mute, ghostly anguish. His casting technique, in which the live model is wrapped in strips of plaster-soaked cheesecloth, imparts a rough texture and a minimum of surface detail to the figures, thus heightening the sense of anonymity and isolation.

Segal, George (1924– ) sculptor; born in New York City. After moving with his family to New Jersey (1940), he studied at New York University (B.A. 1950) and Rutgers (M.A. 1963). He specialized in sculptural environments, creating lifelike scenes in isolated situations, such as "Man at a Table" (1961). His unpainted white plaster figures are cast from living people.